What does (@) mean! ?

Like the English word at, the phonetic symbol is [at].

With the rapid development of the Internet, the application of e-mail has become more and more extensive, and the reputation of @ has also become heated. You may not know that there are many little-known stories in this @!

Did you send an email today?

There is a dazzling history about @. 10 years ago, we couldn't imagine what @ stands for today-e-mail, let alone how e-mail affects people's daily lives.

As a brand-new way of communication, e-mail makes us extremely efficient. It may only take a few minutes to reply to 20 emails, but it may take a whole day to reply to 20 phone calls.

Nowadays, people have fully realized the convenience of e-mail. "Send me an email if you need anything!" Become fashionable immediately. If you ask, "Did you send an email today?" I'm afraid it's hard to deny it.

The first email

Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer working for BBN Computer Company of ARPANET, the US Department of Defense, brought about this epoch-making change. He is taciturn, cautious and especially modest. In 197 1, Tomlinson is ordered to find the representation format of the e-mail address. First of all, he wrote a small program, which can combine the file transfer protocol of this program with the sending and receiving ability of another program, so that a letter can be sent from one host to another. Thus, the first email was born.

When Tomlinson finalized the program, he immediately sent an email to the employees, telling them that they can send letters to other computers now. "So, the email announced itself." Tomlinson said.

The appearance of @

Next, Tomlinson's job is how to ensure that this email reaches the right computer. He needs a logo to distinguish his personal name from the host he uses. @-Tomlinson chose this special character at a glance, and it will never appear in a person's name. "Be brief, because simplicity is the most important thing. Right there. @ is the only prefix on the keyboard. I just looked at it and it was there. I didn't even try other characters. " This can not only convey the information of someone in a place concisely, but also avoid the confusion when the computer processes a lot of information, so the first digital address transmission tomlinson@bbntenxa came into being.

Thus, there is the expression of e-mail we use now: name, code+@+computer host or company code+the nature code of the organization to which the computer host belongs+the country code represented by two letters. This enables e-mail to be transmitted accurately through the network and gives the symbol @ a new meaning.

Tomlinson thinks that although @ makes him a legend, it's nothing. "What brings me the greatest happiness is that I found a solution to the problem in a complex system. The harder the problem is, the more I like it. "

@ This is the unit of volume.

Used in e-mail, is undoubtedly a great innovation of Tomlinson. But before that, "there was a glorious history. That may be the real origin of @.

Let's look back at the distant Middle Ages. In a small town called Prato near Florence, an Italian scholar found a letter written by a Florentine businessman in 1536 in the archives of the Institute of Economic History of the city. The letter mentioned his shipment to Spain, and all places related to the volume of wine were indicated by @, which is the earliest record of using this symbol so far.

After analyzing and comparing the containers, wine prices and metering systems in the Middle Ages, experts found that Italian wines were sold by cans at that time. "Wine jar" is anfora in Italian, and there are @ about 1 14 gallons. To this day, Anfora is still the unit of measurement for Italian wines.

@ has become body double of at again.

In medieval Europe, because the printing press had not been invented, it was necessary for monks, the only knowledgeable class at that time, to carve a book by hand. Although the word at is short to write, it is often used.

In order to reduce the fatigue caused by handwriting, monks thought of @ as the unit of measurement of wine, so they used this symbol. Later, with the development of printing equipment, people no longer used @ instead of at, but its main function became to express the unit price of goods. At this time, the word "every" has meaning. For example, "Sell@sixdollars" means to sell for $6. At this time, the frequency of using the symbol @ is greatly reduced.

Readers of @

Due to the increasing popularity of e-mail and the cultural habits of the country and the nation, the address of the symbol @ is also different. Germany, Holland and South Africa call it "monkey tail", Russians call it "puppy", Finns call it "Mimi", France and Italy call it "little snail" and so on. However, in many English-speaking countries, @ is directly pronounced as at.

In China, there are many pronunciations of @, and there are two popular ones: one is circle A, and the other is "flower A". In fact, in the representation of e-mail, @ means at, that is, "a user" is in "a server". So according to the specific meaning of @ here, we should pronounce it as "at".

first generation

Nowadays, Generation @ is a new term put forward by a leisure life research institute in Hamburg, Germany, which generally refers to the new and new human beings with the age of 14 ~ 29 who have grown up with the information age. In Generation @, the Internet is their favorite home, which fills them with the dreams of gold diggers and the happiness of creators.

But in reality, education and medical experts have long called for fatal deep vein thrombosis if people sit in a fixed position for a long time, indulge in the Internet and lack activities, so we must be alert to this embolism.

Goodbye.